Battle

by Tom Abrahams

  “Warn us about what?” asked the man named Marcus.

  “The Scourge is back,” he said. “And it’s worse than it was before.”

  CHAPTER 19

  FEBRUARY 10, 2044, 2:31 PM

  SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

  ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  Dr. Charles Morel stood in the control center with one hand tucked under his arm and the other scratching his chin. His eyes were glued to a pair of monitors, both displaying the interiors of holding rooms. Like all the others, the subjects inside those rooms were strapped to stainless steel examination tables. They were CV-18 and CV-19.

  CV-18 was a man; CV-19 was a teenaged girl. Neither of them had come to the facility willingly. There weren’t enough volunteers, so Dr. Sharp had ordered the “involuntary retrieval of noncompliant subjects.”

  Both subjects were injected with the YPH5N1 virus. Neither of them were showing symptoms anymore. Neither of them were sick, even though others would have been by now.

  Morel picked up his tablet and tapped a combination of icons. An array of biometric data appeared on the monitors in front of him. Their eye patterns were normal, their glandular secretions appeared within range, and their heart rates, brain activity, and oxygen levels were all negative as far as an infection was concerned. He smiled to himself.

  There had been other subjects who’d been slow to develop symptoms and hadn’t yet become irretrievably ill. None, however, other than CV-18 and CV-19, were asymptomatic.

  His stomach churned at the thought of having to explain it to Dr. Sharp. He reminded himself he knew the day would come where he’d have to answer for what he’d done, what he hadn’t told Sharp about his work.

  He rechecked the data. His eyes scanned the other monitors. They revealed the silent agony of the subjects inside their rooms. Some writhed in pain, others lay virtually lifeless, their arms and legs occasionally twitching.

  Behind Morel, a series of clicks told him someone was coming in the lab. “Speak of the devil,” he mumbled to himself.

  He didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know it was Sharp. She announced herself with a string of expletives.

  “You better have good news for me,” she warned. “I’ve had nothing but issues today.”

  Morel quickly tapped on his tablet and switched the monitor displays. CV-18 and CV-19 were replaced with cameras in the autopsy room. “What issues?” he asked, deflecting.

  “We’ve managed to get one subject past the wall,” she said, taking her place next to him in front of the monitor wall. “But it’s dead. I’ve got no tracking on him. Even if we infect thousands with its rotting corpse, we’ll never know about it. So, at least for testing purposes, it’s a failure.”

  Morel raised an eyebrow. “Is that it?”

  “No. We’ve got fourteen implants working here.”

  “Correct.”

  “And thirty-five more that we haven’t inserted into a subject?”

  Morel checked the tablet. “Yes.”

  “We’ve deployed how many into the field?”

  “One,” said Morel. “CV-01.”

  Sharp bristled. “I thought there were others,” she snapped. “You told me there were others. The AI told me there were other trackers in the field north of the wall.”

  Morel shook his head. “No. The plan, as you explained it, was to deploy CV-01 and CV-02. CV-02 died. We’ve not readied any of the other subjects for deployment.”

  “Then why are there trackers in the field?”

  “We injected trackers into the general population months ago,” he said. “We needed to test the tracking programs and the injectables themselves. They’ve been active for at least ninety days. Don’t you remem—”

  “Of course I remember,” said Sharp with a look that told Morel she’d forgotten. She cursed and narrowed her eyes. “What’s with those monitors?”

  Morel rubbed his chin. “What about them?”

  “Why are we looking at the autopsy rooms? I’ve had my fill of Bolnoy.”

  “I—they…”

  Sharp glared at Morel. The tight bun at the top of her head pulled her eyes outward, as if she were a large cat. “Change the monitors,” she hissed. “Show me something I care about.”

  Morel switched the screens back to the only options he had. CV-18 and CV-19 reappeared. Morel kept his eyes on his tablet, pretending to be engrossed in something.

  “They don’t look sick,” said Sharp. “Are they sick?”

  “Let me check their vitals.”

  Morel punched the tablet. “They appear normal.”

  Sharp was uncomfortably close to Morel. “What do you mean normal?” she asked. “Were they injected? Have we followed the protocol?”

  Morel nodded but kept his eyes on the tablet. “Yes. We followed the protocol. Both subjects are carrying the virus.”

  Sharp took a step closer to the monitors, forcefully brushing against Morel. “Yet they’re asymptomatic? No fever? No elevated heart rates? No elevated leukocytes?”

  “No.”

  “How long since they were exposed?”

  “Five days.”

  “Five?”

  Morel nodded. “Yes. They appear…”

  “Appear what?”

  “Immune.”

  Sharp sucked in a deep breath. “I guess we knew we wouldn’t have one hundred percent efficacy. Still, I would have preferred not to have two seemingly healthy people unaffected. That doesn’t bode well.”

  “It’s only two,” said Morel.

  “Yet it’s two,” she said. “Not one. Do we know why yet? What makes them special?”

  “We haven’t started on that.”

  “Get started on it, then,” said Sharp. “Euthanize them and send them to Bolnoy. We need to know ASAP where the weakness is. Then we can further enhance the virus.”

  Morel looked up from the screen. “Euthanize them?”

  Sharp shrugged. “How else did you think we would isolate their defense mechanisms? Their immunity?”

  “I didn’t—”

  Sharp cackled. “Of course you didn’t. For as brilliant as you are, Morel, you’re an absolute moron. Euthanize them, get them to Bolnoy, and deploy another subject south of the wall. In fact, deploy three.”

  “That will take a few days. It took us four days to ready the deployment for CV-01.”

  “Do it in two,” she said. She waved at the monitor wall. “Get those two to Bolnoy before the end of the day.”

  Morel sheepishly nodded again. Sharp grumbled something about his intellect and marched off. The door buzzed and clicked behind her. He exhaled as if he’d been holding his breath underwater for too long.

  He’d always been afraid of Sharp. It wasn’t because of her acerbic personality or her aggressive scientific pursuits, which were often in direct contrast to his beliefs. It was because of the sway she held over him, the ways in which she held his life in the palm of her bony, icy hands.

  Morel, like most of the people working for the government after the Scourge, did so because of the benefits it provided their families. For years, those living outside Texas had trouble maintaining a subsistence level of survival.

  As the government regrouped, as it rebuilt or reengaged a virtually abandoned infrastructure, more and more jobs became available. They were, however, mostly connected to the government itself. It was a post-Scourge new deal that saw men and women fixing roads, manning power plants, and ultimately building the wall. Using the model designed and constructed a quarter of a century earlier, more than a thousand plague survivors erected the wall around Texas in eighteen months. In some places it was a solid, twenty-foot limestone edifice. In others, it was a patchwork of metal, wood, and concertina wire. It kept the Cartel inside, for the most part, and prevented able-bodied men and women from abandoning the new order of things on the outside.

  Charles Morel wasn’t a prepper. He hadn’t had the foresight to anticipate the coming end-of-the-world-as-he-knew-it. There was no compoun
d in the Smokey Mountains. He didn’t farm or know how to make candles out of beeswax. He wasn’t an expert marksman.

  He was like most of the survivors. He needed work. He needed running water and electricity. He needed food. He was dependent on others. A job with the government, no matter how distasteful it might seem, was the best path toward that end.

  Thus, when an opportunity to work for the CDC in Atlanta came available, he took it. He moved his depressed wife and four surviving, emaciated children to Atlanta, Georgia, from Raleigh, North Carolina.

  He’d worked for a biotech firm in what had been the Research Triangle Park. It, along with every other job in the RTP, had evaporated. Companies that might have been able to isolate and eradicate the Scourge, as they had so many other diseases, folded when most of their leadership died. Morel had no choice but to move.

  The change in their lives was immediate. The CDC had sent them a large hydrogen-fueled van in which to transport themselves and their belongings to a new home in Atlanta. They were given a spacious loft in Buckhead five miles from Morel’s new job.

  There was electricity. Hot and cold water flowed from the faucets with a wave of their hands. They had a large refrigerator and freezer stocked with fresh fruits and vegetables.

  “I haven’t seen a fresh peach in two years,” Morel’s wife had said. A smile had shone across her sullen face for the first time since they’d lost their twins to the Scourge.

  In the bedrooms there were clean linens on the queen-sized beds. Clothing, in the right sizes, hung in the walk-in closets. The toilets flushed.

  In the coming weeks and months, his wife returned to the happy, show tune-humming woman with whom doctoral student Charlie Morel had fallen in love so many years earlier. His children put on weight. They slept without nightmares. They read books and played chess.

  Morel went to work each day with the belief he was working on a vaccine for the Scourge. He was part of an elite team of researchers who’d come from across the country to prevent another outbreak of the disease. They’d gotten close. Building upon German research, the team, led by Dr. Gwendolyn Sharp, had managed to incorporate modular nanoparticles into what they called an “adaptable vaccine.” As a disease evolved, the vaccine would learn and adapt to the changing viral structure. It seemed to have worked. Then the focus changed.

  Sharp had come into the lab and told her team they were shifting the focus from vaccination to enhancement. She’d told them that using their nanotechnology to take the existing virus and make it more lethal was a more urgent goal than preventing the existing virus from reemerging. She’d also told them it was none of their business, yet, as to why the shift was occurring.

  Some on the team quit. They refused the new assignment. They were stripped of their jobs, their homes, their refrigerators stocked full of chilled produce, and their flushing toilets.

  Morel had gone home more than once to explain to his wife he couldn’t keep his job. He couldn’t do what they wanted him to do. He couldn’t create a monster worse than the one he’d spent so much time seeking to destroy.

  He also couldn’t bring himself to tell her.

  Life was difficult enough in a rebuilt world. Remove the trappings of a government job and it would have become unbearable again.

  Night after night, week after week, he prepared himself to drop the bomb. He’d invariably failed to deliver. Then one day he was in his lab, taking his time with a new batch of samples, when Sharp marched in and ushered his assistants out of the space.

  “I know what you’re doing,” she’d said flatly.

  Morel had looked up from his microscope and squinted at her. “You mean epithelial analysis?”

  She’d slithered toward him. “No. I mean I know you’re dragging your feet. You’re here, true. You didn’t leave like the others with your skills. But you’re not engaged. You’re not proceeding with the enthusiasm needed for our project.”

  Morel had squeezed his eyebrows, hoping to convey some sense of confusion, some nonverbal denial of her accusations. He’d shaken his head. “Of course I am,” he’d said. “I’m here all the time. We’ve made excellent progress and I—”

  Sharp had raised her hand to stop him. “Save it. I looked at your work. I’ve seen the retardation of your excellent progress. If this is the best you can do, then you might as well pack up your boxes. You might as well tell your wife what you’ve been dreading.”

  Morel had sat up straight in his seat. He’d pulled back his shoulders and swallowed hard.

  The corner of Sharp’s mouth had curled up into a nasty half-smile. “We know,” she’d said, “because we track you. We track everyone. That inoculation you got when you first arrived here? It contained a biometric tracker with satellite mapping.”

  The color had drained from Morel’s face. What else did they know? What else had they surveilled?

  “Every night since we first told you about the enhanced mission, the importance of this new direction, you’ve walked your five miles home and then traveled around your building for another hour before heading up to your home. You pace back and forth. You start for the entrance, pause, and then retrace your steps to the sidewalk.”

  “You’re tracking me?”

  “Of course. We also have cameras in your building, on your building, on the street corners. Dr. Morel, let me be clear. We don’t invest in people the way we’ve invested in you, and your delicate wife, and your young, now healthy children, without insurance. Without having the ability to track our investment. I’d hate to think we’d need to sell short your stock.”

  Morel had scratched his head and rubbed the back of his neck. The tension in his muscles had built like a rubber band stretched to its limits.

  “Do you understand?” she’d said. “Do you think your wife would understand, should I have the same conversation with her?”

  Morel had clenched his teeth together. His fingers had curled on the table, his nails scratching at the cold black granite surface. He’d nodded his understanding and Sharp had left him alone. When his team had returned to the lab, asking him questions, he hadn’t answered them and had implored them to work harder.

  He’d wondered so many times since that day if he’d made the better decision by staying. Would they have been better off taking their lumps and moving on to something else, to somewhere else? Now he knew, despite what it meant about his morality and the eternal destiny of his soul, he’d made a good choice.

  “Euthanize them,” she’d said to him.

  Euthanize them.

  CHAPTER 20

  FEBURARY 10, 2044, 3:45 PM

  SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

  BAIRD, TEXAS

  “Keep him back,” said Norma. “If he’s taking off that suit, I don’t want him anywhere near me or Rudy.”

  The hearse-driving, hazmat-suit-wearing stranger who called himself Taskar had already removed his hooded mask.

  Everyone else save Marcus was thirty yards from him. Rudy and Dallas had their weapons leveled at Taskar. Lou was picking her fingernails with the sharpened tip of one of her knives.

  Marcus figured the suit was more dangerous than the man. He’d been breathing filtered air. The bloodstained suit was exposed to the elements, though.

  “Take your gloves off last,” Marcus warned. “Don’t touch anything with your bare hands. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”

  The stranger removed his suit methodically, if not with difficulty. It took several minutes for him to disrobe. Marcus watched to make sure Taskar didn’t touch the exterior of the suit with his bare skin.

  When the visitor was finally down to his sweat-soaked boxers and undershirt, he shrugged. “What now?”

  “We gotta burn that suit,” said Marcus. “Then we gotta take you to get some clothes. You got any matches?”

  “In the hearse,” he said. “On the passenger seat.”

  “Probably should have thought of that before you took off the suit, genius,” said Lou.

  Marcus sh
ot Lou a glance. “All right, then,” he said. “You can use a stick or something to dump the suit in the building over there. There are hot spots that’ll burn it.”

  Taskar nodded, his teeth chattering, and walked over to the char of debris half a block away. His boxers hung low on his narrow hips, his thin shirt flapped against his skin in the slight breeze that threatened to strengthen in the late afternoon.

  He picked up a shard of the splintered pine framing stud and dragged it back to the hazardous suit. Using the wood, he managed to fish the crumpled, potentially infectious plastic from the road, carry it over to smoldering cinders, and fling it onto a healthy flicker of remnant flames.

  He repeated the journey two more times and then heaved the wood into the hot mess. He crossed his arms over his body, cupping his elbows with his hands. Marcus motioned to him and led him toward the jail.

  The others kept their distance. Norma held Rudy’s free hand. Rudy whistled at Fifty to stay at his side. Dallas strode alongside Lou, his long legs not having to work hard to keep pace with her. All of them watched the stranger with suspicion.

  Marcus moved closer to Taskar. “So you’re telling me they’ve concocted some mega virus and they want to release it here? They want to kill everybody south of the wall?”

  Taskar, his teeth chattering and his skin goose pimpled, nodded. “It’s awful. It’s worse than the Scourge. I’ve seen it. They call it YPH5N1. I think it’s the plague mixed with swine flu.”

  Marcus rubbed his hand along the back of his head. The others pretended not to pay attention to their conversation. They maintained their distance, but each of them carried their heads to one side as they walked, as if to inch their ears closer to what the visitor said.

  Taskar described the bloody deaths, the mortality rate, the high-tech labs, the snipers on top of the CDC headquarters, the evil woman in charge. He stopped walking when he explained how he’d put Lomas out of his misery. His chin quivered, but not from the cold.